Amazon Digital Discount Helps Arcade Fire Hit No. 1

“The Suburbs,” the new album by the Arcade Fire, the accordion- and strings-loving Montreal band that has been indie-rock royalty since it emerged in 2004, edged out Eminem’s latest blockbuster for the top spot on Billboard’s album chart. “The Suburbs,” released last week, has sold 156,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan; Eminem’s “Recovery” (Aftermath/Interscope), which spent its first five weeks of release at No. 1, held at No. 2 in its seventh week, with 152,000 sales.

Rave reviews for “The Suburbs” and two sold-out shows last week at Madison Square Garden — one filmed for a live Webcast by Terry Gilliam — no doubt helped the Arcade Fire reach the top. But perhaps just as important was a steep discount by a decidedly non-indie retailer. Last week Amazon sold digital downloads of the album for $3.99, while iTunes and other digital stores had it at $9.99.

Reaching No. 1 is a first for the band as well as for its American record label, Merge, a small but well-regarded independent based in Durham, N.C. News of the accomplishment bounced around the Internet on Tuesday night after another Merge band, Spoon, took to Twitter with team-spirit congratulations: “Let the record reflect,” the message said, “that Merge Records is the NUMBER ONE LABEL IN THE USA!”

Photo

Win Butler of the Arcade Fire, which bumped Eminem from the top of the Billboard chart.Credit
Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Neither Merge nor SoundScan would say what proportion of the band’s sales last week came from Amazon, but the discount clearly helped: 62 percent of the album’s sales were as digital downloads, according to Billboard — more than twice as many as the band’s last album, “Neon Bible,” had in its first week in 2007.

Since Amazon opened its MP3 store in 2007 it has been competing aggressively against Apple’s iTunes, the dominant music seller, and the Arcade Fire is not the first act that has benefited from competitive pricing and gotten a boost on the charts. In January, for example, Amazon offered Vampire Weekend’s “Contra” for $3.99, and that album shot to No. 1. (The next week it lost 65 percent of its sales and fell to No. 6.)

Amazon’s boost is usually gratefully accepted by artists and record labels. But some record executives also worry that the fire-sale pricing may further devalue recorded music.

Merge would not comment on its arrangement with Amazon, but executives at other labels, speaking on condition of anonymity because the deals were private, said that Amazon typically selects an album to promote and sells it at a loss, by paying a label its standard wholesale price — usually about $7 — while offering it to fans for $3 or $4.

Those losses may be helping to raise Amazon’s long-term profile as a digital music seller. In May the NPD Group, a market-research company, said in a report that while iTunes’ share of the download market had remained flat for more than a year, at about 70 percent, Amazon’s had grown to 12 percent, from 8 percent.

Amazon declined to comment on its pricing policies.

The race between Eminem and the Arcade Fire was followed closely inside the music industry and out, but numbers for the rest of Billboard’s Top 10 this week are less exciting. Avenged Sevenfold’s “Nightmare” (Warner Brothers), last week’s No. 1, fell to No. 3 with 45,000 sales, and “Trill O.G.” (Rap-a-Lot), the latest by the rapper Bun B, opened at No. 4 with 41,000.

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Nos. 5 and 6 are a photo finish. SoundScan put Rick Ross’s “Teflon Don” (Maybach Music/Slip ‘N Slide/Def Jam) at No. 5 and a new Lady Gaga release, “The Remix” (Interscope), at No. 6, with about 39,000 sales for both. (SoundScan’s publicly reported numbers are rounded; as subscribers to its full data report could see, the titles were separated by sales of four albums in any format.)

When asked about the Arcade Fire’s success and its deal with Amazon, Laura Ballance, a founder of Merge, said in an e-mail that the label had “leveraged every marketing opportunity available to us to reach new fans.” But in true indie fashion she gave a shout-out to the corner record store. SoundScan data show that independent stores held their own against big-box stores.

“Is it wrong for me to want to point out that independent retail also did really well with this record?” Ms. Ballance wrote. “They made a significant contribution to making this record No. 1. Without them, Eminem would have had it.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 12, 2010, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Amazon Digital Discount Helps Arcade Fire Hit No. 1. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe